The land is just a few miles north of Ozaukee County along a pristine stretch of the Lake Michigan shore.

It is home to a system of wetlands and sand dunes that is so rare it is said there are few places like it in the world.

The habitat it creates is so valuable to endangered animal and plant species that it is protected by state and federal law.

Even so, destroying the wetlands, grading the dunes, reconfiguring the landscape with imported dirt and planting and chemically fertilizing exotic grasses to create a luxury golf course is perfectly acceptable.

The DNR—Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources—has a complicated mission ranging from monitoring manure spreading to maintaining state parks, with a plethora of a diverse regulatory responsibilities in between, so it’s not surprising the agency often causes irritation and controversy. But love it or hate it, the DNR has remained essentially true to the ethic that the public should have access to Wisconsin’s abundant natural lands and waters.

Even though it is still only a concept and not a single brick of its forbidding, industrial-themed facade has been laid, Port Washington’s Blues Factory serves as supporting evidence for Gov. Tony Evers’ proposal to limit the amount of money raised through tax incremental financing (TIF) that municipalities can give developers.

The governor’s budget seeks to rein in the profligate use of TIF funding as a developer incentive.

Politicians tend to treat tax cuts like the candy some of them toss to spectators along a parade route—a bit of confection to keep voters happy.

But lately the recipients of tax treats are finding they’re not so sweet. Many Americans seem to have a sour attitude about the federal tax cut that was implemented in 2018.

That’s because it is becoming clear that the tax cut was huge and puny at the same time—huge in the total reduction of $1.5 trillion in taxes, puny in the tax decrease seen by taxpayers with middle-class or lower incomes.

Illustrating the bald eagle’s remarkable comeback in Wisconsin, the noble raptors have been seen frequently this winter in Ozaukee County, especially soaring above Coal Dock and Upper Lake parks in Port Washington.

This one was recently spotted by Ozaukee Press photographer Sam Arendt perched above a farm field in the Town of Port Washington.

Additional evidence of the bird’s recovery is a survey released by the Department of Natural Resources last month that recorded 1,695 occupied bald eagle nests in the state — the most since the survey began in 1973.

Last week’s Port Washington High School boys’ varsity basketball game was a golden opportunity for the school to show off its new gym to a crowd that had come to cheer on the Pirates and see Nicolet High School basketball star Jalen Johnson play.

An American astronaut who left on a deep space mission in 2000 and returned to Earth in 2019 would find many changes but perhaps none more bewildering than the fact that Americans are getting sick with measles again.

When the imagined astronaut left, the disease had been declared eradicated in the U.S., thanks to what has been called one of the most important health advances in history—the measles vaccine.

But in 2018 there were hundreds of measles cases in 17 outbreaks of the disease in the U.S.; 2019 is on pace to have more.